Climate Strike: So many contradictions for a single day!

Yesterday, on September 27, 2019, an impressive number of Canadian youth (and older folks) walked for the climate.

Many were of course likely happy to skip school. They were paradoxically encouraged by their school boards/teachers to do so (usually we do not strike in conformity but rather in opposition!).

Others may have been genuine carers for the environment, simply keen to show their care. Bravo to them in that case, perhaps even more so to those who took the initiative to clean the mess after the walk (like some did in Montreal).

Yet other folks walked to score political points, to signal their virtue, and to perhaps gain a few more votes (in French, we can say, they aspire to be or appear to be *VERTueux*/*VERTueuses*).

Who knows? Maybe others walked without knowing precisely why they did so. Perhaps they did not want others to take a guess neither.

Last but not the least, other walkers almost received a dozen eggs on their heads (oups not a vegan projectile; how daring). Aye for this gesture!

That egg incident in Montreal reminded Bambi of a trip she made to Beirut in 2000. On that same trip, she visited Lebanon, Syria, and France. In each country, a historic event happened: In Lebanon, Israel withdrew its army after 20 years of occupation. Wow. In Syria, Assad the father (BIG dictator who has occupied Lebanon as well) died. Yes, even dictators die too. In France, their national soccer team (“Les Bleus”) won the European Championship. Bambi still recalls how she has naively (OK stupidly) cheered by standing up and applauding to a German goal (the opponents of the French, her favourite team in the world). All this happened at a pub of a small village filled with excited soccer fans. Wrong team or wrong country ?. Aye for Bambi who managed to return safely to Canada!

Anyhow, to come back to the eggs that Mr. Trudeau almost received on his head yesterday in Montreal, well, Bambi saw a sort of an avalanche of eggs from balconies meant to fall on the heads of Hizbollah militia parading in their tanks in a Beirut neighborhood after the historic withdrawal of Israel mentioned above. The irony of the contradiction then was that people seemed to be thrilled yet they did not appreciate seeing Lebanon being oriented too much toward Iran. Plus, they would have preferred to see this group return their weapons like all the other groups who participated in the ugliest civil war.

Anyway, as our Prime Minister, Mr. Trudeau represents all the contradictions we have been observing in our country lately, not just during an electoral campaign. In Bambi’s mind, he also represents a lack of efficient leadership for all sorts of reasons beyond this post (although somehow related too).

Perhaps the apparent contradictions that has attracted Bambi’s attention the most were four other interesting events:

1. Mr. Legault, Prime Minister of Québec published an open letter to the youth of Québec reaching out to them on this important day (when they were going to be on the streets). A smart gesture by a pragmatic man who seems to behave like a leader of a real country would:

https://www.journaldequebec.com/2019/09/27/lettre-a-la-jeunesse-quebecoise

2. An article informed us of Prince Harry’s eco-anxiety:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/prince-harry-eco-anxiety-leaves-me-struggling-to-get-out-of-bed

Bambi will not comment!

3. Mayor Valérie Plante, who has been saying that Montreal is an unceded indigenous territory, even a Mohawk one (considered a controversial sentence in December 2017), came up with a platitude that goes like follow: As adults *we do not inherit* earth from our ancestors but we rather *borrow it* from our children. Doesn’t the later contradicts the former? In other terms, our ancestors/elders do not matter any more now? Only kids and babies… oh no, babies YAK to them when we are going toward a mass extinction! Many young women have been deciding not have children anymore. A large number came together to sign a document and put pressure on politicians.

4. Last but not least, perhaps the most ironic (disturbing) message Bambi heard today whilst working in her office was the chanting of young kids outside: “Stop the violence, stop the hatred… keep the oil in the ground… no pipeline on stolen land…”.

Violence and hatred. Did Bambi hear well? Is this a song by strikers in the Middle East or in Congo? Oups, no. It is in Sackville, NB, Canada, one of the most peaceful places on the face of earth!

What are we teaching (brainwashing?) our young kids? Plus, what is meant by stolen land? What about first nations folks who work or aspire to work in the oil industry anywhere in Canada? Don’t they deserve to have their voices heard too? And wouldn’t their opinion be perhaps different from the spirit of this chant?

If we keep going down this road of radicalism (“à la Greta” with her apocalyptic message at the UN), we could/would risk one day silencing dissident voices; just like the Hizbollah can at times do to folks from its own community who do not believe in its methods of fighting potential occupations or wars with Israel.

To conclude this post, what really and seriously worries Bambi is to see the beautiful, noble, and necessary ecologism being hijacked by radicalism (a bit like how Islamism hijacks Islam).

In Montreal, Greta T. talked again about the need to listen “to the scientists. Which ones? Bambi wondered to herself? Only those who would say: Transfer those funds, keep that oil in the ground, trash “economic growth”, limit people’s freedoms, add taxes… because the end is near? What if their scientific studies and predictive models do not yield similar results? Or what if they keep in mind the bigger picture of the climate in connection to the economy and… reason? What if they stand up to tell Greta and her movement that this does not seem to make sense anymore? Would Greta tell them at the next UN meeting: “How dare you too?”.

Oh, one more question: Why doesn’t Greta ask us to listen to engineers too? After all, it is them who will be innovating solutions in order to transition to other forms of energies one day.

At the pace things are evolving in our world, it will surely take many years to de-radicalize our young people’s brains, unless people will start opening their eyes.

As one of the smartest men Bambi knows said once: If we keep moving in this direction, it is Alberta who would risk leaving our beautiful Canada… before Québec. The latter, despite its impressive electrical power and potential for more of it, as Mr. Legault pointed out to in his letter to the youth.